Ovarian cancer (OC) disproportionately affects the women of African American (AA) background at all stages of the disease, from presentation through treatment. Most upsetting fact is that AA patients have greater mortality, and their survival rates are continuously decreasing as compared to Caucasian American (CA). Success in understanding and characterizing the involved mechanisms in existing racial disparity is greatly hampered by the lack of suitable cell line models. Therefore, our specific objective of this SBIR Phase I proposal is to standardize the procedure and collaborative set-up for developing novel ovarian cancer cell lines to advance OC health disparity research. This will be achieved in two parts: (A) development of in vitro cell line experimental model of ovarian cancer and fibroblast cells from freshly-resected tumors/ascites fluid of AA patients; (B) Genetic characterization of newly developed cells by isoenzyme profiling, Karyotyping, short-tandem-repeat profiling and mutational analysis. Moreover, we will characterize the developed cell line for typical morphology, growth rates (population doubling time), tumorigenic and metastatic potential and drug sensitivities. Successful completion of the proposed research would establish a standardized protocol for generation of novel cell line models of OC and thus provide a strong foundation for our next step i.e. Phase II for developing up to 50 cell line models from patients of AA backgrounds as well as genetic admixtures.